It was glass half full for Rocket Lab as its Electron booster went into space on its maiden flight, but failed to reach orbit. Today at 4:20 pm NZST (04:20 GMT), the unmanned rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand and achieved the official space altitude of 100 km (52) mi three minutes later. However, it failed to reach orbital velocity and plummeted back to earth somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

Billed as "the first orbital-class rocket launched from a private launch site in the world," Electron is designed to launch small satellites of less than 150 kg (330 lb) to reach sun-synchronous orbit at a cost of about US$4.9 million. It should do so at a rate of 50 launches per year, compared to the US average of 22 times per year and the international rate of 82 per year.

Where other companies are looking at reusable boosters, Electron is designed to keep costs down by means of a composite construction, 3D-printed rocket components for the in-house designed Rutherford engine, and swapping turbo pumps for electric motors powered by lithium-ion batteries to feed propellants to the engines.

The reason for today's orbit failure is still unknown, but Rocket Lab says that the company's engineers in Los Angeles and Auckland, New Zealand will analyze 25,000 data channels from flight telemetry to isolate the fault and correct it. The Electron is slated to fly three more test flights this year, with the next launch aimed at determining the booster's maximum payload.

Electron prior to launch

Rocket Lab

"It has been an incredible day and I'm immensely proud of our talented team," says Peter Beck, CEO and founder of Rocket Lab. "We're one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years. We've worked tirelessly to get to this point. We've developed everything in house, built the world's first private orbital launch range, and we've done it with a small team.

"It was a great flight. We had a great first stage burn, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation. We didn't quite reach orbit and we'll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position to accelerate the commercial phase of our program, deliver our customers to orbit and make space open for business."

Rocket lab says that is has already lined up paying customers for when it goes commercial, including NASA, Spire, Planet, Moon Express, and Spaceflight.

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David Szondy is a freelance journalist, playwright, and general scribbler based in Seattle, Washington. A retired field archaeologist and university lecturer, he has a background in the history of science, technology, and medicine with a particular emphasis on aerospace, military, and cybernetic subjects. In addition, he is the author of a number of websites, four award-winning plays, a novel that has thankfully vanished from history, reviews, scholarly works ranging from industrial archaeology to law, and has worked as a feature writer for several international magazines. He has been a New Atlas contributor since 2011.

4 comments

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JimFoxMay 25, 2017 11:33 PM

Good result. Compared to many times in history that new rockets have failed or exploded on the launchpad... SpaceX for instance.

A73PhoenixMay 26, 2017 12:46 PM

Great job guys, the reason for failure was probably you rocket was considered a threat and shot down.

TanstarMay 26, 2017 01:04 PM

It's great and I wish them the best of luck and much success. However, am I reading it right and they are dropping lithium battery packs into the ocean? That's not cool.

jade_goatMay 27, 2017 02:15 AM

Good progress. However, cluttering up the sea with hundreds of disposed carbon-fibre rocket stages (which will take forever to decompose) isn't good. If it is possible to eventually use some kind of biodegradable polymer for the rocket stages, that would be better. Maybe something that's lignin or cellulose-based?